An Open Letter to Artists, Aspiring Artists, and the Art-Inspired in and with Hong Kong

Yang Yeung

Dear all, who make art and make art happen,

It had happened before. It is happening again and it may well happen over and again that we are challenged to suspend what we do in art, with art, for art, and as art, to “join the protest”. The act of putting everything in our hands down and changing their orientation, to wrap elbows around elbows and march on, is beautiful, compelling, and in critical times, urgent and necessary. I am writing this letter not to dispute that. Not at all. I am here to make the case that we don’t have to lay art down in order to protest. We can do both at the same time. In fact, we must.

My take is, art cannot be suspended to make space and time for protest. I refuse to think of art and protest as dichotomies on the level of truth. I refuse to choose one over the other as if they are mutually exclusive on the level of truth. The conflict lies on the streets – each body, each missing body, counts. The challenge for us then becomes bigger: us, whom art calls for. We are called for not only by protests, but also by art. We need to become not only protesting bodies, but also supple and sensuous ones: drawing, painting, dancing, moving, jumping, touching, laughing, whistling, dreaming, day-dreaming, questioning, thinking…All these that we have been doing enrich our capacities to rule ourselves better.

We are confronting those who claim to rule but fail to – they rule by crushing all that they cannot give a name to. Or, they crush by naming (reducing and controlling) all that they are afraid of, so that they hold them down as objects for their narcissistic condescension. To rule ourselves, we must do better.

Those who claim to rule have an insatiable appetite to kill dreamers – this has happened in human history – for they are afraid of those who can see right into their anxieties and unconscious, those who know of no boundary in their free mind. To rule ourselves, we must do better.

Art is not safe, just as any other fundamentals of humanity are not when autocracy wants to lay claim on everything. If we feel forced to discard who we are that art calls for, we are letting arbitrary power destroy the fundamentals of humanity. To rule ourselves, we must do better.

Protest is one but not the only form of dissent. Art, by refusing normativity and by insisting on thinking differently is also dissent. We can put our routines regulated by society on strike as a revolt against arbitrary power that works its way into society. But we cannot put our capacity to imagine, think, and envision in art, from art, and through art on strike – for we cannot put life on strike. To sustain art as dissent, we must try harder, to stand up and show up as who we are and what we are best at. This, too, is the fight for freedom and self-determination. To rule ourselves, we must do better than forcing ourselves to make false choices out of provisional dichotomies.

If we were to be the first ones to discard our own Being in art, or the way art is our core competence and future becoming, no one would be able to save us, or defend art. To rule ourselves, we must do better than turn away from the nuances, complexities, and uncertainties fundamental to being human that art is the best at tapping.

An artist friend sends a piece of George Steiner wisdom across the Pacific: “In an interview of George Steiner in Beauty and Consolation, he talks of the 1937 Soviet writers conference where everyone was to declare allegiance to Stalin or be arrested (disappeared). Pasternak remained silent, which was also enough to have him arrested. Finally, he stood up and cited the number of a Shakespeare sonnet. Two thousand people then stood up around him and recited his translation of that sonnet. It said everything: you can’t touch us, you can’t destroy Shakespeare, or the Russian language, and what they had learned by heart.”

The voice of Vaclav Havel also rings, “People used to see society ‘from above’ tend to be impatient. They want to see immediate results. Anything that does not produce immediate results remain foolish. They don’t have a lot of sympathy for acts which can only be evaluated years after they take place, which are motivated by moral factors, and which therefore run the risk of never accomplishing anything.” (Vaclav Havel, “The Politics of Hope” in Disturbing the Peace)

Our instinct tells us this risk is worth taking. We can afford to be foolish. “We lack the right word for the extreme energizing and governance of instinct, for the ordered enlistment of intuition, which mark the artist.” (George Steiner, Real Presences)